


These Winding Paths

by becoming-the-moon (corvidity)



Category: Mushishi
Genre: Belonging, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-04 22:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4154643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidity/pseuds/becoming-the-moon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ginko wanders and wonders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Winding Paths

Ginko wanders.

Sometimes the dirt underfoot crumbles away, slippery with little stones. He has walked over muddied paths after torrential downpours and he has followed good, firm paths with loamy soil, a light vein flowing underneath and mushi sprouting from it by the dozen. The mountain paths can be treacherous for anyone not familiar with the lie of the land, but Ginko knows that if he appeases the mountain lord he will pass (mostly) unscathed. His knowledge of mushi is his compass; and he wanders the paths alone.

Ginko wanders and wonders if any of the paths he takes will lead him home one day, as much as he knows the folly of his wish. The world is his home, but Ginko wants to walk paths which stir familiarity in him, which make his bones ache with fondness, not nostalgia; he envies the roots that others make without ever knowing. Wherever he goes suspicion and bad misfortune grow, and sometimes gratitude, but that is rare.

Wherever he goes the mushi gather too, drifting alongside him as he walks. And, if he’s to be honest, he’s lost track of whether he follows them or they him. Every day dawns on new mountains, and every day there is new undergrowth around him, and a new path for him to trail to new destinations. There are some paths he returns to and people he greets more than once, but they are such fleeting things. He watches them pass on roads parallel to his; they who have a life lived in human bounds while he walks on a path of thorns, between mushi and human.

He walks on snow-clad slopes and brushes past dead branches; they scatter on the ground and crack under his feet, dry and brittle. Ginko pauses awhile on a tree stump, the knot in its wood deep and its whorls looping in infinite asymmetry. In the spring, a mushi has taken up residence in the stump, and the eye is obscured by tangled green vines the colour of kouki. Ginko lays down next to the stump and closes his eye, then closes it again, and the darkness is there to greet him, the light vein glowing with a life so alien to him yet which is the very essence of his livelihood.

As he drifts through the present no paths lead to his past, no roots reach that far back. It remains a vast, empty question mark, and if ever Ginko resents the tokoyami in its eye, its sudden whims and wills remind him it is only living as it knows how. So too is he, following the light veins under the earth. Some nights he forgets to stop walking, and through his dreams he chases after threads that lead nowhere. Around him, the night is soft and shrouds him in its folds, holds him like a breath underwater, until the sun rises and Ginko is spat back into the present, his single eye glowing a little less luminously. By day, the future traces tracks in the red earth beneath his feet, but they too spiral into nothingness. And when will it vanish, he thinks, when will I vanish and become it, or even less than it, lost in the light veins and carried to secret places. There is nowhere he does not belong, and one day he will be everywhere and belong to every point along every path.

His feet sink into the twilight and the night parts before him. The roads to and from the mushi now intertwine like the vines he remembers from so long ago (but it could just as easily have been a second in the past), and before him the soft light of the life vein coils around all the words he has yet to say. Ginko steps into a puddle of water, the stars reflected in the liquid darkness. He takes another step, and the darkness rises up around him. He might be falling, might not be, but his heart is an aching thing held between two pale, glowing hands, and this, he realises, is where the paths have always led.


End file.
